Depending on how comfortable you are with tech stuff, you might consider rolling your own Nextcloud. You can build one up pretty cheaply with a Raspberry Pi and external HDD the size of your choosing, but you do need to be able to administer and support it yourself. There's good documentation, but I wouldn't recommend taking it on unless you are very IT-minded. The upsides are: you are in total control, there are no ongoing monetary costs, the amount of storage is up to whatever size drive you use, and it maintains your privacy (no corporation is responsible for your files).

Depending on how comfortable you are with tech stuff, you might consider rolling your own Nextcloud. You can build one up pretty cheaply with a Raspberry Pi and external HDD the size of your choosing, but you do need to be able to administer and support it yourself. There's good documentation, but I wouldn't recommend taking it on unless you are very IT-minded. The upsides are: you are in total control, there are no ongoing monetary costs, the amount of storage is up to whatever size drive you use, and it maintains your privacy (no corporation is responsible for your files).

Now, that's a *great* idea and the positives far outweigh the negatives. It would pay for itself in no time, especially if you use a large drive, like 8 or 10 TB.

This is a tech idea I can get behind, and well worth it for the simple reason that YOU are in total control, and do not kowtow to any corporation. You beat them at their own game, and there is no goose that lays their golden egg, ie, no ongoing monthly residual cost except for the electricity cost of running the server, which should be > $5 month, even at the outrageous cost that we in Calif have to pay for power ($0.45 per kilowatt hour).

Now, that's a *great* idea and the positives far outweigh the negatives....

The big negative is it's not really cloud storage, just a fancy NAS. All the data is still in one place: your home. If your home is destroyed, so it all your data.

One option may be to deploy it remotely at a friend's/relative's place a reasonable geographic distance away, to reduce the chance both your house and theirs will both be destroyed by the same incident.

For maintaining privacy, a number of online backup services allow you to encrypt with a private key before uploaded. MEGA has a sort of weak form of this, in that MEGA can't access your data, and if you forget your password, you can't access your data unless you previously downloaded the private key.

Tarsnap is the "ultra paranoid" version of this, since not only does it use private keys, but the client is all open source, so you can independently verify there's no backdoors or exploitable flaws in the code:https://www.tarsnap.com/

One option may be to deploy it remotely at a friend's/relative's place a reasonable geographic distance away, to reduce the chance both your house and theirs will both be destroyed by the same incident.

Right, that's the way to do it. Arrange with a friend or colleague (whom you trust!) who lives at a remote location, and offer to mirror his data as well. In other words, you each go in half, and you're both covered in case either one of you should lose your onsite data. No companies to deal with, no outrageous monthly fees, no sudden termination of contract surprises, etc.

I'm going to do this project with a friend. Thanks for suggesting it. Great idea that will pay good dividends...